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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.

Episode 105 Refuse Fascism

Sun, 4/3 1:22PM • 24:01

Sikivu Hutchinson 00:00

Certainly with the imposition of these abortion bans, communities of color in general and Black women in particular have been the most negatively and catastrophically impacted… As other “third world countries” are decriminalizing abortion, and yet here the US is, this font of supposedly democracy and egalitarianism and individual liberty and rights, and we’re at the precipice of apocalypse when it comes to unrestricted on demand and without apology abortion… I say get the f*** out into the street, agitate, resist, disrupt.

Sam Goldman 00:54

Welcome to Episode 105 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. Today’s episode features Sikivu Hutchinson. Sikivu is a novelist, playwright and director in conversation with Sunsara Taylor, co-host of the Revolution Nothing Less show on YouTube, co-initiator of RiseUp4AbortionRights.org and host of We Only Want the World on WBAI and WPFW. They discuss what Sikivu refers to as apocalyptic effects of abortion bans and restrictions on reproductive freedom for Black women. This interview originally aired on We Only Want the World Tuesday March 29 on WPFW.

I’m keeping my commentary short this week as myself and others who work on the show are putting our energy into nationwide demonstrations called for by Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights taking place nationwide to respond to the escalating Christian fascist assault on legal abortion. But this episode is still packed with content and ways for you to act. So listen, share and join us in the streets next Saturday, April 9th. See the show notes for links to protest locations.

Sam Goldman 02:28

Before we share the interview, we need to take a moment to talk about some of the developments from just this past week, as they relate to what’s in Sunsara and Sikivu discuss. On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the “don’t say gay, don’t say trans” bill. This is deadly, despicable and, yes, fascist. We stand with the LGBTQ community in Florida. We take inspiration from the courageous walkouts and other acts of protests over the past weeks. In the face of this bill turning into law, these protests should escalate. If we are to stop fascism, we must be done with the dynamic of defeats turning into demoralization.

The attacks on LGBTQ people are not a gimmick to get votes or a passing fad. Just as in the 1930s when the books the fascists burned were about gender, sexuality and communism, these laws are a key element in the rising fascist program for a patriarchal white supremacist America. Our power to stop this and to create the kind of beautiful society that lives in these fascists worst nightmares starts when we take the streets when we keep coming back when we don’t stop.

Arizona just became the second state this session to pass a 15 week abortion ban after Florida. They’re emboldened by their expectation that Roe v Wade will soon fall. Arizona governor Doug Ducey signed the 15 week abortion ban into law this past week. There is no exception for rape or incest. Like Florida, it mirrors the Mississippi case that the Supreme Court with their stacked pro fascist majority is poised to gut and very possibly overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision that established the right of women to an abortion. This case is a direct challenge to that and a decision is expected by late spring, likely June.

These fascists want to maximize the chance that these laws will take effect whatever the court decides. A day before international Transgender Day of visibility, Arizona Governor Ducey once again, signed legislation that prohibits gender affirming care for Arizona trans children, even when doctors say that the treatment is medically necessary and life-saving, while banning trans girls from school sports teams that align with their gender identity. We’ve got to get real. This is going to keep getting worse unless and until we resist, stepping outside the confines of official politics and filling the streets with our fury for the lives that this cruelty imperils.

In a perfect illustration of the type of vicious white supremacist, Christian fascist movement that seeks an army of good Christian women to be incubators, Kelly McEnany, Trump’s former spokeswoman, in an interview with conservative Christian actor and activist, Kirk Cameron, declared: “Christians have got to be bold, you know, the antidote to darkness is light, and the antidote to a really grim future is filling the world with a lot of Christian babies who could bring that light to the world.” I recommend Katherine Joyce’s article on this, linked in the show notes. Go, read it — of course after listening to this episode. Then go back and listen to our interview with Katherine Joyce.

Imagine being jailed for three years for being a good person and giving someone in need abortion pills. Well, this isn’t dystopian fiction, but reality and Poland. Justyna Wydrzyńska is the first pro-choice activists in Poland to go to trial for breaking the country’s abortion law, one of the most restrictive in Europe. She did what anyone with a heart would do and provided help to a woman who had an unwanted pregnancy and was a victim of domestic violence, get an abortion. As Anna Louie Sussman reported on for The Cut, Justyna’s case, “offers a glimpse into what may be coming down the pike for those seeking and facilitating abortions in the United States, where lawmakers are turning their focus to restricting and criminalizing the use of abortion pills. Their usage soared during the pandemic fueled by the increased reliance on telemedicine and the lifting of the Food and Drug Administration’s requirement that abortion pills be administered to patients in person. State legislators reacted by introducing more than 100 state level legal restrictions on medication abortion in just the first quarter of 2022, including nine restrictions on the mailing of abortion pills, according to the Guttmacher Institute.”

On April 8, this week, Friday, Justyna will face the Polish Court accused of aiding and abortion. To learn more and support Justyna, check out the link in the show notes. Don’t think this can’t happen here. It’s precisely where things are headed if we don’t rise up before it’s too late. Get in the streets nationwide on April 9. The US Supreme Court is poised to take away women’s rights to abortion this spring. Only the people can stop this. Take to the streets. Rise up for abortion rights now. Abortion on demand and without apology. Forced motherhood is female enslavement. Rise up, wear green.

Now, here’s Sunsara interviewing Sikivu Hutchinson.

Sunsara Taylor 07:53

Sikivu Hutchinson is an author, a novelist, a playwright, and among other things, this is one of her books: Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Values Wars. I’m very happy to welcome her. She, among other thins, recently participated in the mass protests on International Women’s Day, around sounding the alarm and standing up against the abortion rights emergency. So, Sikivu, welcome.

Sikivu Hutchinson 08:17

Good to be here.

Sunsara Taylor 08:18

Listen, I wanted to start by just giving you the chance to talk about why you participated in the protests on International Women’s Day with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, how you see the abortion rights emergency and why it’s so important that people are in the streets standing up against this.

Sikivu Hutchinson 08:33

I participated because I have long been committed to pushing the envelope and speaking out and resisting the incredibly Christian fascistic authoritarian stentorian state violence that’s being imposed upon the bodies of women and the bodies of people who are attempting to exercise basic human rights and bodily autonomy, as well as economic and reproductive justice. So I felt that it was really critical to come out in this moment where we see an almost cataclysmic convergence of this crackdown on abortion rights, on reproductive justice, on voting rights, on LGBTQ plus and queer human rights, on anti-racist education. All of these convergences are deeply — not just discriminatory but they’re — almost apocalyptic for communities of color, particularly working class communities of color. It’s important to lift our voices, given the fact that there are so many young people, Gen-Z and millennial youth, that are unaware of this legacy of mass resistance to these forces of Christian fascist, basically, apartheid.

Sunsara Taylor 09:50

Well, I think it’s really important that you use that term “Christian fascist,” which describes a very virulent, very fundamentalist woman-hating—and in this country, always laced with white supremacy—brand of religious fundamentalism. And you use the word almost “apocalyptic” in terms of the impact of this assault on communities of color. I know you put a special emphasis on the effect of abortion bans and reproductive restrictions on Black women and young Black women. I thought it’d be important for you to bring that alive a little bit more, precisely because, as you say, most people don’t understand this assault or know what its full ravages will bring.

Sikivu Hutchinson 10:27

Certainly with the imposition of these abortion bans, communities of color in general and Black women in particular, have been the most negatively and catastrophically impacted. We’ve seen scores of Black women who are unable to gain access to abortion, who are unable to acquire the childcare that they need if they have to travel out of state—and the southern states that impose these draconian abortion bans. This harkens back to decades ago, pre-Roe, when you had the majority of folks that were dying from botched abortions, from illegal abortions, from back alley abortions—being Black women and Latinx women and indigenous women. The impact coming into the 21st century is going to be devastating, not just in terms of family planning and the typical mainstream liberal tropes that are articulated with regard to choice, but in terms of economic justice, in terms of multi-generational wealth, in terms of African-American, indigenous and Latinx women and people with uteruses having access to affordable housing, to equitable education, to jobs that pay a living wage.

All of these are under the reproductive justice umbrella that was developed and forged and cultivated by Black, Latinx and indigenous women over the past few decades. So these are all major strands that we need to keep in mind as we’re out on the streets raising our voices against this incredibly devastating regime of racial capitalism, of white supremacy, of Christian nationalism, of misogynoir—which is anti-Black misogyny. These are things that we not only need to amplify in terms of trying to disrupt and dismantle the devastating effects of these laws, but also in terms of the critical consciousness of the younger generation that is not aware, perhaps, in quite the same way, of this heritage of extreme apartheid and disruption in the lives of women of color and communities of color in general.

Sunsara Taylor 12:11

I want to ask you to link this as well to the religious and the Christian fascism again. In the book, Away With All Gods!: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, Bob Avakian has a whole chapter dedicated to—the title of it is “The Bible Belt Is the Lynching Belt.” There’s a deep history to this, and there is a reason why today, as Christian fascism reasserts and actually has captured the dominant position in the Supreme Court, in many statehouses, in the Republican Party as a whole, this comes imbued with both the patriarchy and the misogyny, but also the white supremacy. There are deep roots to this that I know you’ve done a lot of work on, and I just want to give you the chance to share some of your thinking on that question.

Sikivu Hutchinson 13:17

Certainly with the imposition of these abortion bans, communities of color in general and Black women in particular, have been the most negatively and catastrophically impacted. Certainly, the Trump movement has been a major catalyst for the resurgence of this. We can look at it going all the way back to the Tea Party movement and the assault on human rights, on civil rights, on LGBTQI and women’s rights, and the way in which that has been imbued with this Christian Dominionist rhetoric and propaganda around a reclaiming space for white folks, essentially, and that being intimately tied to breaking down the barriers between church and state; intimately tied to trying to basically impose theocracy in American government. That always has a white fundamentalist Christian base.

If we look at what’s going on, for example, in Florida and Texas, and this premise that they are trying to, with these LGBTQI educational bans, to protect youth—they’re protecting youth in the name of imposing this extremely homophobic and transphobic and cis-normative rhetoric that is going to have extremely deleterious and insidious implications for Black, queer, Latinx and indigenous youth, non-binary youth, gender-nonconforming youth. There’s always the cultural propaganda of abnormality, of dysfunction, of attempting to reclaim God and country and motherhood under a patriarchal umbrella. So I think it’s important to be aware of all of these interlocking discourses when it comes to the limitation of our fundamental human rights that activists have been attempting to claim for so many generations. And now we’re back at this point of medievalism.

Sunsara Taylor 15:02

Among the things that you’re mentioning are some of the restrictions put on education in the name of protecting the youth, and I know you are also an educator, and you put a special focus on young Black women’s development, and I wonder if there are things about their understanding of this assault on abortion rights, conversations you’ve had with them, things we have to learn from them, but also things that have to be shared with them and other young people. What’s your perspective on that with the interaction you’ve had?

Sunsara Taylor 15:02

The very final words in the speech that you gave at International Women’s Day in Los Angeles — I’m not going to quote it directly but you said something about how we have to shut down, we have to defeat this terrorist assault, this fascist assault and this lie — of this is what I want to ask you about this lie — of American exceptionalism, which I think is a particularly important insight that you brought to the stage — of so much of what we’re up against is the notion that’s popular in this country that: Oh, fascism can’t happen here. This… you know, the enslavement of women, of forced motherhood — that can’t happen here. And it is American exceptionalism — that there’s something special about this country that’s so democratic and so free that it could never happen here. You called it a lie, and I think that’s important. I’d just like you to say a little bit more about that.

Sikivu Hutchinson 15:04

Some of the major conversations that we have had at the high school level are around this issue of bodily autonomy and the violence that is specifically inflicted upon Black women: Black women being perceived as unrapable, Black women being perceived as promiscuous, Black women not having the same level of innocence as white women and white girls do, particularly when it comes to being criminalized and disproportionate rates.

We know that African American girls are about ten times more likely to be suspended, expelled, and pushed out of school then are non-Black girls, and a lot of that has to do with all of this cultural propaganda about the demonization of the sexuality of Black women and girls, and the apartheid conditions that exist in the United States. The fact that Black women’s bodies have always been serviceable commodities. This is something that I pointed out in my speech on International Women’s Day, that we’ve always been constructed, going back to the era of enslavement, as beasts of burden, as breeders, as incubators for the plantation economy. So certainly, we can see a very concrete connection between that heritage and what’s going down now, with the abortion bans and all of the fetal personhood bills that are being instituted in the Midwest and the South.

So, these are some things that we really delve into in the Women’s Leadership Project, which is a Black feminist mentoring and civic engagement program that I founded back in the early 2000’s in attempting to link this to the necessity of keeping reproductive justice space for Black women and girls and Latinx women and girls in South LA. For example, some of our youth have partnered under the Stand for Black Girls Initiative with Planned Parenthood and a couple of county agencies to secure a well being center on the campus of one of the South LA partner schools that we work with, to secure a reproductive mobile health unit. And California, relative to the Midwest and the South is certainly an oasis when it comes to reproductive healthcare. Governor Newsome, for example, just signed an abortion accessibility/access bill that would eliminate out of pocket costs for abortions. There is greater access to medication for abortion in the state of California.

All of these rights and all of these resources and services exist, but at the same time, you have this disconnection in working class and lower income communities of color. Specifically in South LA, where I work, where youth may not be aware that they have these kinds of resources that are available. So if you bring them onto campuses where you have trained providers who are culturally competent, who come from the community — that’s another lynchpin, having providers that actually look like us, that may have a Black feminist or Latinx feminist or woman’s perspective. That’s critically important. These are some of the things that we work on with the young people in South LA.

Sikivu Hutchinson 16:38

Yeah, I was thinking about that in terms of what’s happening in Colombia, what has happened in Mexico, what has happened in Argentina and in scores of other “third world” countries that are decriminalizing abortion. And yet here we are supposedly — and I hate to use that pronoun “we,” it’s just shorthand — here the U.S. is this font of supposedly democracy and egalitarianism and individual liberty and rights, and we’re at the precipice of apocalypse when it comes to unrestricted, on-demand and without-apology abortion for women and people with uteruses. I just wanted to underscore that irony.

Another thing that I cited in the speech was what Alice Walker said in her landmark anthology, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, where she talked about the fact that our great grandmothers did not have this right as enslaved women, that there were so many other things that our great-great-great grandmothers could have been doing with their agency other than being forced to be incubators to pop out baby after baby in service of the slave regime, in service of plantocracy, in service of racial capitalism and building brick-by-brick, body-by-body white wealth; white supremacist wealth. So, again, it’s important to connect all of these dots when it comes to these gross and violent and terroristic paradoxes of the way in which the U.S. is perceived globally.

Sunsara Taylor 18:41

My final question if you have any words that you want to share to people who are watching who maybe didn’t know about this emergency or what they need to be doing. And also for those who say, well, the best we can do is prepare for a post-Roe America and help as many women as we can. If you have any parting words that you want to add.

Sikivu Hutchinson 19:17

Yeah, I was thinking about that in terms of what’s happening in Colombia. What has happened in Mexico, what has happened in Argentina, and scores of other “third world” countries that are decriminalizing abortion. And yet here we are, supposedly, and I hate to use that pronoun “we,” it’s just shorthand. Here the US is this font of supposedly democracy and egalitarianism and individual liberty and rights. And we’re at the precipice of apocalypse when it comes to unrestricted, on demand and without apology, abortion for women and people with uteruses. So I just wanted to underscore that irony.

Another thing that I cited in the speech was what Alice Walker said in her landmark anthology In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, where she talked about the fact that our great-grandmothers did not have this right as enslaved women, that there were so many other things that our great great-great-grandmothers could have been doing with their agency, other than being forced to be incubators to pop out baby after baby in service of the slave regime and service plantocracy, in service of racial capitalism, in building brick by brick, body by body, white wealth, white supremacy as well. So again, it’s important to connect all of these dots when it comes to these gross and violent and terroristic paradoxes of the way in which the US is perceived globally.

Sunsara Taylor 20:57

My final question is if you have any words that you want to share to people who are watching, who maybe didn’t know about this emergency, about what they need to be doing, and also for those who say: Well, the best we can do is prepare for a post Roe America and help as many women as we can, if you have any parting words that you want to add.

Sikivu Hutchinson 21:15

I say get the fuck out into the streets. Get out into the streets. Talk to other folks of color, particularly young women of color across sexuality. Agitate, resist, disrupt. Write editorials, give talks, again, in public venues, and try and vote out these fascists, in addition to supporting abortion funds. There are a number of really important abortion funds that specifically help Black, Latinx and indigenous working class, and Asian working class and low income women.

Sunsara Taylor 21:46

Sikivu Hutchinson, I want to thank you so much for making the time and talking with us today.

Sikivu Hutchinson 21:50

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Sam Goldman 21:51

For more from Sikivu visit her websites SikivuHutchinson.com and follow her on Twitter @SikivuHutch.

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. I want to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics or guests or lend a skill. Tweet me @SamBGoldman or you can drop me a line at [email protected]. Record a voice message by going to anchor.fm/refuse-fascism and clicking the button there.

Want to support the show? It’s simple: show us some love by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice. And of course, be sure to follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode. Chip in to support our pod and content creation to help people understand and act to stop the fascist threat. You can donate by visiting RefuseFascism.org and hitting the donate button or Venmo or Cash App Refuse Fascism.

Thanks to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks to Sunsara Taylor and We Only Want the World team. Thanks to incredible volunteers. We have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox each week. I’ll see you in the streets for Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights nationwide protests April 9. That’s this Saturday. Again, you can find a protest at RiseUp4AbortionRights.org. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.